The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [43]
Couldn’t tell you if he talked trash about me, too.
Saul spoke incessantly about singles. “I hear this as a single,” he would say. Initially this was exciting. We’re cutting a hit record, at last! I thought. But he said this about every track. He’d want us to play an overdub, and we’d be skeptical; “But I hear this as a single,” he’d whine.
Tracking was fraught but efficient. At the end of eighteen days we had all the songs down. I was exultant. I had envisioned our grooves rendered with a sort of New Wave tightness, and here it was. From then on, my job was to keep everybody from wrecking it.
I failed. And I’m a hapless archivist; were I better at it, I would have made sure I walked out of the Power Station on day eighteen with a tape in my hand. I could’ve put it in a drawer for years, and then released the director’s cut.
We mixed the album at Sony Studios, far on the West Side of Manhattan, next door to a hulking, windowless building topped with satellite dishes that served to house machinery for the phone company. Behind the studio was a room that Mariah Carey had furnished when she was mixing there. Couches deep as queen beds, tasseled pillows, gold-filigreed wallpaper. The band lurked in there, getting high, as I sat next to Saul at the console.
Saul was a gossip. He was a compulsive gossip; sometimes the candor made me uneasy, and I tried to change the subject, but he was relentless. He told stories about record company presidents’ mob ties, which label president had been excoriated by his Japanese corporate suzerains for the raggedy waywardness of his wife, which singer had a meth habit, which radio executive liked to get high on coke at his country house and shoot a pistol at imaginary rabbits, which singer fucked every guitar player she ever worked with—thus, any producer who wanted to finish a record with her had to keep her from fucking the guitar player until tracking was done—which R&B superstars had begged their labels, to the point of tears, to let them step outside racial and musical boundaries and make a rock record or a country record, story upon story of singers who were abject idiots, and, uncomfortably, stories about black artists whom he’d call, “So smart. So smart.”
I thought he was taking me into his confidence. He wasn’t. I bumped into the drummer from Sugar Ray a year later, and he asked, “Is it true your bass player once———?”
We did a song for a sound track during a break in mixing. I had us work with a producer guy who had done some fantastic lo-fi recordings with some outlandish indie bands; I wanted that scratchy sound. “Who is this guy? You didn’t ask us,” the band guys barked, about a month after his hiring was confirmed.
Contrary to my scheme, the producer guy was taking this opportunity to use a major label budget to up his game and leave his lo-fi rep behind. He booked five days at an expensive studio to record one song. I told him we needed one day, and he laughed me off.
The assistant engineer on the session was a wild ass-kisser. “I can’t believe I’m working with Soul Coughing!” he kept saying. “You are the most incredible band I’ve ever worked with. You sound incredible!”
We did the sound-track song in a day. Like I told the guy. Then, as I was packing up to split, I heard the band playing one of the tunes we had already recorded with Saul.
What’s going on? I asked, my heart rate speeding up.
“I just want to play,”said the bass player. “For the first